Who are the “chosen people”? The Hebrew Bible assigns that designation to the ethnic group called the Israelites. But why would the God of all humanity favor one ethnic group over all others?
Furthermore, the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible repeatedly calls for good deeds, for behavior that meets the ethical and religious standards laid out by God’s laws. Why wouldn’t God reward righteous individuals and punish wrongdoers regardless of their ancestry?
Both of these questions are addressed in the haftarah (reading from the Prophets) of Amos 9:7-15, which accompanies either this week’s Torah portion from Leviticus, Acharey Mot, or next week’s, Kedoshim, depending on the tradition a congregation follows.
Chosen people
The portion Kedoshim contains this statement that the Israelites are God’s chosen people:
And you shall be holy to me, because I, God, am holy, and I separated you from the other peoples to be mine. (Leviticus 20:26)
But the book of Deuteronomy expresses the idea of a chosen people the most clearly:
For you are a holy people to God, your God. God, your God, chose you to be God’s as a people: a personal possession treasured more than any of the [other] peoples who are on the face of the earth. Not because you are more numerous than any of the peoples did God want you and choose you—for you are the smallest of all peoples. But because of God’s love for you, and to keep the oath that he swore to your forefathers, God brought you out from Egypt with a strong hand and rescued you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 7:6-8)
A passage in the book of Amos repeats this idea of Israelites as God’s chosen people, and adds a consequence:
“Listen to this word that God has spoken about you Israelites,
About the whole family that I brought up from the land of Egypt, saying:
Only you yadati
Out of all the families of the earth.
Therefore I call you to a reckoning
For all your iniquities!” (Amos 3:1-2)
yadati (ָדַעְתֱִי) = I know, I am acquainted with, I understand, I care about, I have been intimate with. (A form of the verb yada, יָדַע.)
According to the Hebrew Bible, God arranges the punishment of all kingdoms that go too far in their wrongdoing. According to Amos, this includes the two kingdoms of Israelites, even though God has been the closest to them.
Disowned people?
Then what are we to make of the following verse, which begins this week’s haftarah reading in the book of Amos?
“Aren’t you like the Kushiyim [Nubians] to me, you Israelites?”
—declares God.
“Didn’t I bring up Israel from the land of Mitzrayim [Egypt],
And the Plishtiyim [Philistines] from Kaftor [Crete],
And Aram from Kir?” (Amos 9:7)
This verse reads like a rebuttal of the idea of the Israelites as God’s “chosen people”. The Israelites are no more beloved than the Kushiyim from distant Nubia (Ethiopia). Furthermore, bringing a whole people from one land to another does not mean anything special either; after all, God also arranged the migration of the Philistines from Kaftor (Crete) to the coast west of Judah, and the Aramaeans from Kir (location unknown) to the land east of Israel.
But I suspect Amos’s real point is: “Who do you think you are? You’re not so special!”
Collective punishment
Like most liberal Jews today, I prefer the idea that God cares equally about all ethnic groups; we have some differences, but we are equally beloved, and we humans should treat members of all ethnic groups with respect. However, that is probably not what Amos meant. Given the context of the rest of the book of Amos, God is disappointed that the Israelites are not behaving better than any other ethnic group. Therefore God plans to eliminate them.
Hey, the eye of my lord God
Is on the guilty kingdom!
“And I will wipe it off
From upon the face of the earth!” (Amos 9:8)
Collective punishment is the norm for God in the bible; if the majority of people in a kingdom act unethically according to the standards of the time, God threatens to destroy the whole kingdom. When a kingdom is conquered by an enemy, the prophets explain it as God’s punishment, inflicted because either its king or too many of its people were wrong-doers.
The book of Amos begins with prophecies that God will inflict collective punishment on other countries in the Ancient Near East for their war crimes: Aram, the city-states of the Philistines, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, and Moab.1
Then Amos does use the same poetic formula in his prophecies against Judah and Israel. However, God threatens to punish these two kingdoms not for crimes against other countries, but for crimes within their own borders. Judah will be punished for worshipping other gods, and the northern kingdom of Israel will be punished for cruelty to the poor and violation of what should be sacred.2
Amos does not mention the Assyrian Empire, which has been conquering or subjugating neighboring kingdoms. Other books of the Prophets report that God uses the Assyrians to punish other kingdoms, then uses the Babylonian Empire to punish the Assyrians. (See my post Haftarah for Bo—Jeremiah: The Ruler of All Armies.)
Rarely is there any concept of God picking and choosing among the individual citizens of a kingdom, punishing the guilty ones and saving the innocent ones. But at this point in the book of Amos, God has another thought:
“Except that I will not actually wipe out the House of Jacob,”
—declares God. (Amos 9:8)
This may be an insertion by a later editor.3 Yet in the next verse, God says that the good and wicked people of Israel will be separated in a process like shaking a sieve.
“And no pebble will fall to the ground.
By the sword they will die,
All the guilty of my people,
The ones who say:
The evil will never approach or confront us!” (Amos 9:10)
Probably the wicked Israelites are the pebbles that will remain in the sieve, where they will be killed (presumably by the Assyrians, who will soon target the Kingdom of Israel).The innocent will survive, but they will be scattered in exile. (The historical record shows that the standard practice of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, upon conquering a new land, was to deport most of its native population to distant parts of their empire, and move in people from other locations.)
The wicked Israelites believe that God will never punish them; they think God is too blind to see what they are pulling off, or too weak to do anything about it. According to Amos, God says they are wrong; when Israel is conquered, the guilty will all be killed. Only the good individuals will survive, albeit in exile.
(Historically, the so-called “Lost Tribes of Israel” were deported by the Assyrians from 734 to 715 B.C.E.. The deportees and their descendants remained scattered throughout the Neo-Assyrian Empire, never to return. But other survivors of the Assyrian conquest escaped and settled in the southern kingdom of Judah, where they assimilated with their fellows from the same ethnic group.)
Collective reward
The remainder of the haftarah promises that someday God will restore one large, unified kingdom of Israelites, as in the time of King David, and the land will produce great agricultural plenty for its people.
The final verse of both the haftarah and the book of Amos is a divine promise:
“And I will plant them on their own soil
And they will never again be uprooted
From upon their soil that I gave them,”
—says God, your God. (Amos 9:15)
When will that permanent planting happen? Amos does not say. But the happy ending of the prophecy is about collective, not individual, reward.
The religion of the ancient Israelites, with its emphasis on animal sacrifices and endorsement of war, died with the fall of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Over the past two millennia, the Jewish religion has shifted toward an emphasis on prayer and endorsement of the Torah passages about loving the stranger and freeing the poor from oppression.
Yet many people today, Jews and non-Jews, still believe that their own religion is the only right one, the only true religion—and therefore they and their co-religionists are God’s chosen people.
I pray that we all receive the divine inspiration that Amos (or his later editor) received, and reject the idea of a biased God who singles out one ethnic or religious group for extra benefits. God rescues lots of people and brings them to new lands. In God’s eyes, Amos reports, Israelites are the same as the Kushites.
I wish I could also pray that good individuals will have good lives, and only wicked individuals will suffer. But I am too much of a realist for that. Acts of nature (“acts of God”) affect everyone who happens to be in the vicinity. And acts of organized human groups such as nations also have a collective impact, for good or evil.
Yet as individuals, we can be good to other individuals. And we can try to be a good influence on the groups and nations we belong to.
- Amos 1:2-2:3.
- Amos 2:4-8.
- “The prophet has just represented God as saying He will destroy the offending kingdom from the face of the earth. Although it is possible that he wants to qualify this sweeping declaration, one suspects that the mitigation of the prophecy of destruction is an editorial addition—especially since this entire sentence does not scan as poetry.” (Robert Alter,The Hebrew Bible, Volume 2: Prophets, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2019, p. 1279.)